Книжка-5

1964 Booklet 5 Contents

There are poets who suddenly shine with a violent red flame and with their first call, with their first impulses, they go beyond the boundaries of the ordinary and conquer readers. Even the coldest, simplest words shine with the fiery rhythm of their feelings. It is not ambition, not imitation that directs them to poetic art. Unnoticed, like flowers in the field, their thoughts burst forth and one day we discover that a poet has been born. It is as if some higher power, that earthly-unearthly power, has gifted them with the ability to create their own world of thoughts and ideas. Their vital existence seems to transform itself into poetry. They sink into the spoken words and their poems, like a smile, naturally and effortlessly blossom on their lips. They think, they sigh, they dream in verses. What is expressed in acute life conflicts, or what passes away with chance, they transform into melodic flutter, into poetry. For them, poetry is not a craft. It is an organic breakthrough of their spiritual world. It is a tearing of the crust of everyday life by the inner boiling of experiences. It is a cry of a victor or a lament of victory. A joyful impulse of a discoverer or a suffering anguish of one broken by life. These poets may quickly go out, but the sparks they have scattered around them excite the imagination for centuries. "Fools" and crazy heads, they often draw upon themselves the wrath and curses of prudent grayness. Legends grow around them, the evil rumor of offensive mediocrity follows them, but they turn into myth.

In this article I will touch upon only some issues from the history of Bulgarian drama, related mainly to its striving to generalize, to reach the foundations of historical truth. Of course, a number of problems of the complex historical development of our dramaturgy will remain outside the scope of the article. I will begin with the already well-known fact that our national dramaturgy lags behind our poetry and prose. Our poetry has such representatives as Hr. Botev, P. K. Yavorov, Hr. Smirnenski, D. Debelyanov and N. Vaptsarov, in the field of prose Iv. Vazov, Al. Konstantinov, Elin Pelin, Yor. Yovkov and others have worked, and our best dramas have been created by writers for whom dramatic creativity has sometimes been, so to speak, a second or third passion.

Old Bulgarian literature began its development eleven centuries before our era and therefore differs sharply from modern literary creation. The most obvious indicator of the difference is the predominant religious character of medieval literary works. However, it would be far from the truth to claim that this character alone is the mark that separates them from new Bulgarian literature, mainly from that created in the second half of the 19th century to the present day, although it is inherent in both the content and the form of medieval art. Behind it stand peculiar artistic norms, a specific creative vision, which for modern man is very unusual. On this basis, the principled, problematic characterization of medieval artists who created historically conditioned, historically timely and historically valuable art should be built.

The great poet resembles the sea: the more the diver enters into it, the deeper it becomes, the more wonderful and unsuspected beauties its depths reveal. We experience the same feeling when we want to stir up that wonderful peace of ideological and artistic values ​​that we call the poetry of Hristo Smirnenski. Four decades ago, the "discoverer" of Smirnenski as a poet and his first enthusiastic critic - Georgi Bakalov wrote about him: "He was a poet. A true poet. A juicy poet, as they say. A poet who is rarely born... There is no other poet in our country after Botev as popular among the masses as Smirnenski. The names of the two Hristovtsi are inseparably linked in the consciousness of the masses. Inseparable in immortality.

In all language communities, there are two different language systems: the Practical Modern Language (hereinafter MPL) and the Verse Speech (hereinafter CP)2. In social practice, MPL is usually used in direct communication, while CP is associated with texts of lasting meaning. The latter can be literary and non-literary: grammatical and arithmetic rules, laws of civil law and other texts that must be memorized. In fiction, MPL finds its place in the so-called “prose”, and CP in “poetry”.

In literature, as in ordinary life, one has casual acquaintances, very often people of considerable cultural value, whom, either due to a lack of spiritual affinity or due to an unfavorable combination of circumstances, one has not been able to get to know, appreciate and include in the circle of one's relatives and friends. For many years, Georgi Raichev was just such a casual acquaintance for me. Of course, like all young people of my generation who were interested in fiction, I heard this name very early - back in the blissful times of my adolescence, when it seemed to me that I held the world in my hands. Even then, I had the opportunity more than once to read what Raichev published in periodicals and to leaf through his books - "The Little World", "Queen Neranza", and that "Song of the Forest", which gave rise to talk about him once again. However, these meetings were random in nature and I don't know why they didn't arouse in me a more lasting interest in the writer's personality and work.

Georgi P. Stamatov, born in Russia and spending the first thirteen years of his childhood there, then lived in Bulgaria for 55 years, to which are added another five years as a student in Switzerland. After studying at the Military School, his short service as an officer and his studies in law, from 1902 onwards Stamatov became a judge and then more fruitfully displayed his writing talent. He served in Sofia, Plovdiv, Tran and for the longest time in Kyustendil. His official career as a judge in the Kyustendil District Court, extracted from the court archives, is as follows: from August 1, 1905 to September 31, 1907, from February 1, 1908 to January 31, 1911, from March 1, 1914 to July 31, 1919, and from October 1, 1919 to May 31, 1921.

Literary historians have not yet studied sufficiently the rich material on the traditional interest of the cultural community in the small Slavic nation - the Slovenes (numbering 1,600,000 inhabitants today) in our people, in their fate and their culture. There is evidence of this interest as early as the sixteenth century. Several prominent Slovenes of that time - the travel writer Benedikt Kuripečić, the diplomat Žiga Višnegorski, the first Slovene grammarian Adam Bohorič and one of the giants in Slovene literary and political life, the great Slovene enlightener Primož Trubar (1508-1586) - not only mention the name of the Bulgarians, but also speak with a certain sympathy for them. In later times, the interest intensified, acquired a more problematic character, the Bulgarian language and culture became the subject of study and research in the works of several notable people from small Slovenia: the figure of the Slovenian Renaissance Žiga Zojs, the scholar Jernej Kopitar and the continuer of his work Franz Miklošić, etc. And the most prominent poets of the late 19th century - Anton Askerc, Simon Gregorčić and Josip Stritar, as well as Matija Majar-Zilski, Josipina Turnogradska, Anton Slomšek, L. Klinar wrote works with Bulgarian themes.

"Galileo of modern aesthetics!" (A. Richards), "a seer, a teacher who sheds light on life" (J. Mackail), the founder of many modern artistic and literary trends... For our reader, these definitions of the English romantic poet S. T. Coleridge sound strange and lofty. Some bourgeois literary critics also accept that they are lofty, but what is their subtext, what is the reason for bourgeois literary criticism's fascination with Coleridge, and whether he can only be a "progenitor" of the Neoplatonists, the intuitionists, the Freudians, the "stream of consciousness" - this is still a question that Marxist literary criticism has not answered exhaustively.

Elin Pelin's artistic mastery has already been written, but what has been said is still not enough. The history of the story "Lepo" is indicative of the direction of development of the great fiction writer, his growth as a writer with an original approach and view of our rural reality from the end of the last and the first decades of the present century. A comparison of the different editions of the story leads not only to a more accurate understanding of it, but also to a more complete clarification of Elin Pelin's artistic mastery, illuminates some moments of the creative process: the wear and tear of the product, the embodiment of the idea in verbal form.

Geo Milev's theoretical views on the nature and essence of theatrical art, on the development of Bulgarian theater, as well as his manifestations in the field of directing continue to attract the interest of researchers. The plays he staged, although few in number, were realized in different periods of his life and on different stages: from the attempts in Stara Zagora to stage "Oedipus Rex" by Sophocles in 1915 to the stage of the "Renaissance" Theater as a director of the play "Massachovek" by Ernst Toler in 1923. Some of the rehearsed plays did not see the lights of the stage for the first contact with the audience.

Every touch of Lermontov's work brings us face to face with his titanic spirit, entered into a "proud enmity with heaven", rebellious and freedom-loving, with the raging and restless passions of a heart that has been swinging between love and hate all its life, yearning for freedom, but suffocating in the atmosphere of slavery and lackeys, thirsting for faith and a high purpose, but is forced to writhe in disbelief and despair, to tremble with anger and tremble with rage before the picture of the Russian autocracy. His amazing personality has the ability to draw us closest to him, to make us suffer with his sufferings, to rise with his impulses, to feel his anger towards the cold external brilliance and internal nothingness of secular society, which, like the ancient anchar tree, poisons everyone who touches it. He had the misfortune to be born in the valley of horror and despair, to breathe the decaying breath of defeat after the fateful year of 1825, to live through the years of deaf groans, of broken flights, of mercilessly trampled faith, when evil and vulgarity triumphed unhindered, when informers and renegades became the heroes of the day. Years when only blue uniforms were visible before the eye, when in the monstrous empire of Russia every police officer was a tsar, and the tsar was a crowned police officer. In this valley of slavery and torture, of silent anger and hidden unrest, Lermontov's muse was born. From her first days she experienced the freezing cold of the autocratic empire and came to the bitter, terrifying conclusions that the closest person to everyone was himself, that everyone was doomed to proud solitude. Herzen says of this era that "you had to know how to hate out of love, to despise out of humanity, you had to possess boundless pride, so that with chains on your hands and feet you could hold your head high." And although the adolescent and young man Lermontov is surrounded on all sides by evil, he does not bow his head before it, although he sees how they are destroying the wall between good and evil, how the masters trade with their people, and the people with their freedom, he does not fall into disarming reflection, into passivity and inaction, but chooses the path of manly purposeful struggle. It does not matter that this struggle leads him to death - it is as if he remains undefeated. He is not at all to blame for having fallen into "a bottomless abyss into which the best swimmers sink," where even the greatest talents disappear before they have reached what they are fighting for. The storm of his feelings, the power of his fiery word survived an entire century and reached us and his descendants, who have settled the enmity with heaven by conquering its heights, who know the price of courage and a proud mind.

The work of B. St. Angelov, senior research associate at the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, deals with the Bulgarian writers of the 18th century, little studied or completely unknown to the educated circles in our country, although they represent a significant interest for the construction of the Bulgarian literary and cultural history. While the most prominent figures of this era, Paisii of Hilendar and Sophrony of Vrachan, have long entered the horizon of scientific researchers and the enlightened society, being examined in detail in literature textbooks, their more modest in merits, but still worthy of attention, their predecessors, contemporaries or closest followers, have long remained in the shadows, despite their valuable contributions to the development of our literature and the growth of education or of national and civic consciousness. To honor these forgotten workers of the pen, smaller or larger links in the chain of the historical process, remained the duty of the specialists who undertook to follow this process conscientiously and correctly. The work of B. Angelov comes to fill a significant gap here.

The rich Bulgarian literature of the Middle Ages has not yet been sufficiently well presented to a wider circle of cultural readers and activists. The main reason for this is the fact that a large part of its most valuable works have not been published, which is why they remain inaccessible for direct scientific studies. And the difficulty becomes even greater when one takes into account the fact that most of these works are located abroad (USSR, Romania, Yugoslavia, Mount Athos, France, Germany, England, etc.). And therefore, a joyful fact for our cultural community is the printed appearance of one of the important monuments of old Bulgarian literature, namely the Manassian Chronicle, published under the title "The Chronicle of Constantine Manassi". The Vatican transcript of the chronicle has been published in phototype form, with an introduction and notes by Prof. Ivan Duychev. Thus, a long-standing dream of the Bulgarian public and Bulgarian scientists to see a complete edition of this valuable historical monument is realized. And it must be said right away that the fine initiative to publish old Bulgarian manuscripts (phototype or in block form) should continue, and be placed on a sounder organizational basis. The Chronicle is published as the first book in the well-conceived series "Monuments of Old Bulgarian Literature". It is desirable that the next issues of the series appear sooner. The institutes of literature, language and history at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences are directly interested in and responsible for the implementation of this task. The Manasseh Chronicle has long been known to science, especially through the publications of the Russian scholar A. D. Chertkov and the Romanian Slavist Ioan Bogdan, who published a later transcript from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Vatican transcript is valuable not only for being one of the ancient transcripts of the chronicle, but especially for being its only richly illustrated copy. After Prof. Duychev made a separate color edition of the miniatures of this chronicle, now a natural addition is its complete publication according to the Vatican transcript. The two latest editions, related to the Manasseh Chronicle, already greatly facilitate any kind of research not only on it, but on Bulgarian culture in general, literature and painting in particular. They also have an important place in the studies on our medieval historiography.